The Weekly Standard (February 10, 2014) cover article, 'Kelo' Revisited - tells about the tragedy of how government overreach and land use planning fads destroyed neighborhoods along with people's lives along with them.  The Connecticut town's misery has spread across the country with only state legislatures preventing complete ruin.  Crony Capitalism and hubris at its worst.  It's not over in New London as the mayor ponders the next big thing that might revitalize what once was a family neighborhood - mixed use with multifamily, but private property still isn't on his radar.

‘Kelo’ Revisited

Properties were seized and a neighborhood razed in the name of ‘economic development’ that never came.

FEB 10, 2014, VOL. 19, NO. 21 • BY CHARLOTTE ALLEN

Last three paragraphs:

[Mayor] Finizio’s plans for saving New London seem to be lifted from the pages of Richard Florida’s 2002 “New Urbanism” classic, The Rise of the Creative Class. One of Florida’s theories is that decaying urban cores can turn themselves around by rebranding themselves as magnets for “the creative core”: the hip, the artistic, the poetic, the tech-savvy, and the gay, on the theory that those types generate prosperity by making urban centers fun to live in. A few months ago Finizio endorsed New London’s first-ever gay pride festival, scheduled for sometime later this year, telling the -Courant that it would be an “economic boon” to the city. I also noticed that downtown New London’s Bank Street, running along the Thames waterfront, seemed to be defining itself as a Florida-inspired arts district, with puffy installations filling the windows of the aging storefronts.

For Fort Trumbull, Finizio also has creative-class visions: “tiny houses”​—​those grass-hut-size dwellings on micro-lots that are currently the rage among green types and simplicity buffs. “There are a lot of people concerned with environmental self-sufficiency,” he told me when I interviewed him. “You’re looking at a neighborhood that’s been destroyed in order to satisfy someone’s expensive vision​—​condos, hotels. What hasn’t been tried is a real neighborhood. This would be an opportunity to redo Fort Trumbull as a national first​—​a green, integrated mid-rise community. There would be green tech, LEED-certified buildings, solar power. It would be a green, self-sustaining neighborhood.” Finizio also expressed the hope that the city of New London could ultimately take over title to Fort Trumbull from the RCDA, with its quasi-private status. “There should be direct public ownership of that property,” he said.

More big and grand, I thought. Another New London adventure in eminent domain. Mare liberum. The sea is free. But not Fort Trumbull.

MICHAEL CRISTOFARO STANDING IN WHAT 
ONCE WAS HIS YARD IN NEW LONDON, CONN.

TIM COOK / THE DAY